Music Brings Alzheimer’s Patients Into the Moment
I saw this video over the Christmas holiday, and I can’t forget it. I know one of the reasons I love water aerobics is that they play all this rock music of my generation, and it gets us working hard, some even sing along, belting out the lyrics, LLOOLLL, I’m sure we look ridiculous, but oh, we have a great time and it makes exercise time pass more quickly.
This video shows the dramatic effect familiar music has on Alzheimer’s patients, bringing them out of their fog, however briefly, and animating them once again:
Take the Test :-) Simple Sitting Test Predicts Long Life
Do you remember doing this as a child? I remember doing it, maybe for some Red Cross Swimming class. We could all do it. . . So after I watched the video, I had to try it again. I can get down with no problem – 5 points. Getting up, I needed to use my knee: 4 points. I’m happy with that score, and happy I can still get up and down off the floor 🙂
So my question is this – many people who can’t do it the first time, can do it if they practice. So if you practice, and get good at it, have you lengthened your life? Have your improved your probability of living longer?
Simple Sit Test Predicts Long Life
By Crystal Phend, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Published: December 13, 2012
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner
Action Points
This study evaluated the association between the ability to sit and rise from the floor with and without support and all-cause mortality in adults age 51 to 80.
There was a significant association between the use of more support to sit and rise from the floor and increasing all-cause mortality.
How well middle-age and older adults can get up off the floor may predict their chances of long-term survival.
Each additional support needed to get to and rise from a sitting position on the floor — knee, hands, etc. — was associated with a 21% lower chance of survival over about 6 years of follow-up in a trial online in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
The survival odds differed by 5.44-fold between the highest and lowest scorers on the sit-rise test after adjustment for age, sex, and body mass index, Claudio Gil Soares de Araújo, PhD, of Gama Filho University and Clinimex in Rio de Janeiro, and colleagues reported.
Ability to rise from the floor reflects muscle strength, coordination, balance, and flexibility needed for getting up out of a chair, bending over to pick up an item, and various other daily activities and is also tied to risk of falls, they explained.
“Application of a simple and safe assessment tool such as sit-rise test…in general health examinations could add relevant information regarding functional capabilities and outcomes in non-hospitalized adults,” the group wrote.
Other functional tests are commonly used, such as chair-to-stand and gait speed, but the floor-to stand test has the advantage of requiring no equipment and minimal space and time, they pointed out.
The retrospective study included all 2,002 individuals ages 51 to 80 evaluated with the test at a single center from 1997 through 2011, excluding competitive athletes and those with relevant musculoskeletal problems.
The test was administered on a nonslip surface, with individuals instructed to try to sit on the floor and then get back up without worrying about speed and using the least support they felt necessary.
A maximum of 10 points was possible, 5 for sitting and 5 for rising without any supports. Each support (hand, forearm, knee, side of leg, or hand on the knee) used took away 1 point; and participants could lose an additional 0.5 points for an unsteady performance.
Over the median 6.3 years of follow-up for mortality in state vital status registries, nearly 8% of the cohort died.
Sit-rise test scores tended to be poorer at older ages, but the association between all-cause mortality and score persisted with adjustment for age as well as sex and body mass index.
The hazard ratios compared with the highest-scoring, 8-to 10-point group were (all statistically significant):
5.44 for lowest scores (0 to 3 points)
3.44 for scores of 3.5 to 5.5
1.84 for scores of 6 to 7.5
That translated to a 3-year shorter life expectancy for the lowest versus highest scoring groups.
The researchers noted that no adverse events, such as injury from slips or falls, have occurred during the test over a 14-year experience at the center.
They cautioned that the study didn’t control for physical activity patterns, subclinical degeneration, or recent unreported injuries.
Other limitations were the predominantly white, high socioeconomic status population studied, which may limit generalizability, and the single center design.
Comfort Food: Corn Bread and Chili
While I was cleaning the kitchen and waiting for the last batch of cookies to bake, I whipped up a batch of corn bread for AdventureMan – no use in wasting a hot oven! It is a perfect, cold day in Pensacola. Perfect I say, because it really really is NOT fun baking Christmas cookies – or anything else – in a hot, humid kitchen. How did our grandmother’s and great great’s do it, especially in those voluminous dresses and no air conditioning??
The secret to truly great cornbread is to cook it in a cast iron skillet. You put the skillet in the oven until it is very hot, you take it out (using a pot holder, of course), melt a little butter in the pan, then pour the batter in. It will sizzle, and form a delicious crust. Pop the skillet back into the oven and in 22 minutes (at 425°F) your cornbread will be finished, with a toasty crust. If you want to guild the lily, you can swirl a pat of butter over the top, too.
AdventureMan dunks his corn bread in a glass of milk, which I find totally disgusting, but reminds him of when he was a little boy. It’s just a custom, I know, but I can’t look.
We have a pot of chili brewing, with the last of our home grown tomatoes:
The Qatari Cat is following AdventureMan around, telling him to lie down so they can take a snooze together . . . I think it worked. I can hear them both sleeping . . .
Much Cooler
“Today is forecast to be much cooler than yesterday”
This morning I woke up to discover I had slept eight hours. This is something wonderful for me; a week ago I had to give up taking Benedryl. I am a light sleeper, and I have allergies, so taking one Benedryl every night helped me with both. My doctor said it was time to give it up, that components of Benedryl are thought to contribute to formation of those plaques that speed Alzheimer’s and dementia. Yikes!
For a week I have struggled. I could go to sleep normally, but would awake around three and spend a couple hours wishing I were asleep. Sometimes I could fall back asleep, sometimes not. Part of the problem is the unseasonal warmness of the temperatures, I toss and turn, looking for a cool place.
Then, if I had not managed to get back to sleep, I would find myself getting cross during the following day, a sure sign, just like a toddler, that I need a nap. My naps would be deep and restoring, but probably not that great if I wanted to sleep well the next night. It was a self-perpetuating and destructive cycle. I wondered if I would ever be able to sleep normally again.
Last night I slept normally, and deeply. I woke at six, rested, happy. It helped that the Qatari Cat found elsewhere to curl up last night; many a night I wake up and he is tangled up in my legs and bedding, snoring with contentment. Most important – last night it was cooler. When the temperatures hit in the seventies outside, it can be around 80°F inside when we go to bed, and it makes me restless. I like colder temperatures, and – last night was colder. I slept great! It gives me hope!
Temperatures are lower today, too, and it gives me energy. The heat saps my drive; the cooler temperatures help me be more productive, a good thing in a season where there is much to do! 🙂
Arnie’s in Edmonds
It’s not that I don’t like Arnies. The food is good, and Arnie’s offers a good variety. There is a lot of fresh seafood. Their seafood bisque is very good. Mom loves this place, where you can sit by the window and watch the Edmonds ferry come in and out of port.
It’s just not my favorite place. I like the liveliness of Anthony’s Beach Cafe, or Chanterelle’s, the little Pho 5 place up at 5 Corners. When I go to Arnie’s, most of the customers are – it seems to me – females in their 80’s. Well groomed and hanging in there, but older. Different tastes. It’s a generational thing.
But Mom likes Arnie’s, so I suggest we go there between bursts of rain, and she grins in agreement.
Lunch is pretty good. Mom has her favorite, soup and sandwich, and the soup is the Seafood Bisque and the sandwich is seafood melt:
I have the Seafood Bisque – it really is good – and the Seafood Louis. This Louis even has a small salmon steak topping it, and I love salmon. Pensacola has all the fresh seafood in the world, but you don’t see Crab or Shrimp Louis on the menu . . . LOL, maybe it is another one of those generational things.
It rained while we were there, but as we were readying to brave the rain, it stopped, just enough of a window to get back into the car and to get her back home. Did I mention it rained the entire time I was in Seattle? 😉
Gene Predicts Your Time of Death
This is absolutely fascinating to me – and no, it does not predict the day you will die, but the time of day that in all probability you will die. It’s fascinating, and you probably don’t even have to take a genetic test to make a good guess as to what time of day you might likely expire. This is from HuffPost Science:
Gene Predicts Time Of Death Down To Hour, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post | By Ryan Grenoble
Posted: 11/19/2012 2:39 pm EST Updated: 11/19/2012 3:05 pm EST
In an study published in the November 2012 issue of the Annals of Neurology scientists studying the body’s biological clock (a.k.a. the circadian rhythm) report the discovery of gene variant that not only determines the likelihood of your being a morning person, but also predicts, with unsettling accuracy, your likely time of death.
The gene typically allows for three possible combinations of nucleotides (the four molecular building blocks of DNA): adenine-adenine (A-A), adenine-guanine (A-G), and guanine-guanine (G-G), according to a written statement released by Harvard Medical School.
“This particular genotype affects the sleep-wake pattern of virtually everyone walking around,” Dr. Clifford Saper, chief of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wrote in the statement. “And it is a fairly profound effect so that the people who have the A-A genotype wake up about an hour earlier than the people who have the G-G genotype, and the A-Gs wake up almost exactly in the middle.”
Moreover, investigators realized as some of the 1,200 older subjects in the project died that these nucleotide sequences were accurate predictors of their time of death, within a range of only a few hours. Patients with the A-A and A-G genotypes typically died just before 11 a.m., while subjects with the G-G combination tended to die near 6 p.m.
“So there is really a gene that predicts the time of day that you’ll die. Not the date, fortunately, but the time of day,” said Saper.
The Atlantic reports researchers believe their results may be due to the human body reverting to its more natural, circadian rhythm-induced state as death approaches, instead of the cycle created by social commitments.
Lincoln Movie
We’ve never seen this happen in Pensacola before. We went to see the afternoon showing of Lincoln at the Bayou Rav Theaters and it was totally sold out. People! This is the weekend before Thanksgiving! Aren’t you supposed to be grocery shopping and baking and polishing silver for Thanksgiving? This isn’t James Bond, this is a historical movie! What are you thinking??
“That’s Just Not Right”
We are talking about taking in the new “ferociously exciting” movie Argo today, and having a bite to eat afterwards at Mellow Mushroom. AdventureMan likes their pizzas (you can watch them toss the dough in the air for the crusts) and I like their Portobello Reuben sandwich or sometimes their spinach salad.
“Law and Order Man always has pineapple on his pizza” AdventureMan said, “and every time he does, he says ‘I know there are people who think pineapple doesn’t go on pizza, but I like it.'”
We laugh. We know who he is talking about. It’s us. We have our ideas of what pizza is supposed to be based on our pizza experiences in Germany and Italy and France. Not a lot of sauce, not a lot of cheese, and a sprinkling of toppings – our very favorite being a seafood pizza we ate in Dinard, France, where they threw and handful of tiny still-in-the-shell creatures on and put it in the big, hot wood-burning oven and minutes later we had this thin crust pizza saturated with briny tiny sea creatures, cooked exactly right.
Pineapple on pizza – it just doesn’t seem right to us. I’m glad our son has the gumption to stick to his guns and have pineapple on his pizza if that is what he likes, but . . . not me. Never!
So we were laughing about our preferences this morning and AdventureMan says “that would be like putting pineapple on a peanut-butter sandwich” at which point . . . I stopped agreeing with him.
“That sounds sort of good!” I said thoughtfully.
“No! That’s just not right!” he almost stomped his foot. He will mix peanut butter with jellies, but for some reason, the thought of pineapple in his peanut butter is unthinkable.
I’ve heard of a sandwich Elvis loved, something like peanut butter and banana and bacon, all grilled together between two slices of bread . . . that doesn’t sound good to me, but then again, I haven’t had the courage to try one. I guess it might be the calorie count that also holds me back – fat on fat on fat, LOL.
Do you have any irrational food preferences? Or combinations that, in your perspective, are just not right?
Happy Boy Swimming
“How did it go?” AdventureMan asked as I came in. He had a dental appointment and couldn’t take the Happy Little Boy to his swimming lesson, so I had taken him.
“It’s probably one of the best days of my life,” I told him. “Happy Little Boy had so much fun. He was really swimming on his own, using the ring, even floating on his back. He was really happy.”
A year ago, he was more fearful and clingy. He had his good days and bad days at the pool, mostly good, thanks to some really good teachers. To see him so happy, so confident, so joyful – now that is a really good day. I feel so blessed to have been a part of it.
This morning was his last parent-child class; now he will be joining the bigger kids swimming classes, where we take him and he and the other kids work directly with the teacher without us in the pool . . . so this is the end of an era.
My Mother was asking for some recent shots, so this morning AdventureMan took him in, and I shot some photos. These are for you, Mom 🙂
We have strong feelings about children learning as young as possible how to be safe in the water. As one of our swimming buddies said, “Florida is surrounded by water.” They had better know the rudiments of water safety. Thank goodness for the YMCA, Miss Donna and Miss Bonnie.
(Photos courtesy of adoring grandmother, LOL!)
Gasp! Look What Happens to Your Blood!
I am reblogging this from my friend GreY’s blog. He is a Kuwait blogger; we both started blogging at about the same time. He is, sadly, now battling cancer of the bowel, and has gone totally vegetarian. He posted this YouTube video that is horrifying, and shocking, and is going to make a big difference in the future choices I make:
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